Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (8 page)

More to the point, Mandaean priests and
ganzibra
s have a similar custom of making astrological measurements in order to determine the propitious hours for various activities. When a Mandaean couple are married, they may not have intercourse until the right time, determined in advance by the
ganzibra
through observation of the stars. Afterward they are considered unclean—and, just as the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus says Babylonian couples used to do, “at daybreak they both wash. Before they have washed they will not touch any household utensils.” (For Mandaeans, the washing is the ritual of baptism. For Babylonians, too, it probably meant washing in the river.)

The numbers seven and twelve still have a special significance in Western culture: seventh heaven, lucky number seven, twelve apostles, twelve knights of the Round Table, twelve Greek gods on Mount Olympus. For the Mandaeans, though, “the Seven” and “the Twelve” had their original Babylonian meaning, referring specifically to the stars and planets as supernatural, quasi-divine beings. In the Mandaean Book of John appears this phrase: “The Seven sent him their greeting and the Twelve made obeisance before him.” They still believe, as the scholar of Mandaeanism E. S. Drower wrote, that “the planets are creatures of God and each has a spirit in it.” In the 1930s Drower knew a Mandaean named Hermez bar Anhar, who told her, “I worship all the
melki
”—meaning the heavenly beings—“but my especial worship is of the sun.” Hermez seems to have regarded the sun as a kind of angel; “worship” implies that it is a kind of god, but the Mandaeans do not see themselves as polytheists and vigorously reject any suggestion that they are “star worshipers.” Unlike the Babylonians, the Mandaeans do not have temples to the sun and moon. Still, they have clearly preserved many Babylonian customs and beliefs with respect to the stars and planets.

—————

AT NADIA’S BAPTISM
, as she stood in the waters of the Tigris, the name the priest said to her was meant to remain a secret, and this is the third aspect of the ceremony that links her community with ancient Babylon. Secrecy has been a guiding principle of the Mandaeans and of the cultures from which they came. When Ibn Wahshiyyah was compiling the
Nabatean Agriculture
in the ninth century
AD
, putting on record the agricultural knowledge of the pre-Islamic inhabitants, he encountered many obstacles in his research, for the Nabateans had a strict code of secrecy. “Do you want to argue against the way of our elders and forebears,” he was asked, “and their admonitions to us to keep hidden our religion and habits?” So he reached a compromise: he would tell readers some of the Nabatean “science” but nothing about their religion. To make doubly sure that he did not spill secrets, the writer tells us that he mixed lies in with facts to confuse the lay reader. He gives an example of the code he developed: “The eggplant will disappear for three thousand years” apparently means that there were three months of the year when the eggplant should not be eaten.

E. S. Drower was a good friend of the Mandaean community (a “dear sister in faith,” as one Mandaean priest called her). Yet even she only managed to see their holy texts after nine years of asking. When the head priests of the community found that she had succeeded in deciphering some of their scriptures, they reacted, in her account, with “resentment and anger. These scrolls, they said, contain ‘secrets,’ knowledge imparted to priests only at ordination and never to laymen or outsiders.” As she read the manuscripts, she found that their introductory pages were inscribed with curses on anyone who revealed them to the uninitiated.

The books that Drower read can today be seen in an underground vault belonging to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In those books, and in Drower’s published transcriptions of oral legends told to her by Mandaeans in the 1930s, I discovered more about their radical mythology and the amazing characters that populate it. There is Krun, the flesh mountain, who sounds a bit like Jabba the Hutt; as Drower wrote, “The whole visible world rests on this king of darkness, and his shape is that of a huge louse.” There is Abraham, who appears as a failed Mandaean guided by an evil spirit to leave and found his own community. There is the dragon Ur, whose belly is made of fire and who sits above an ocean of flammable oil. There is Ptahil, “who takes souls to be weighed and sends his spirits to fetch souls from their bodies.” My favorite was the demon Dinanukht, who is half man and half book and “sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself.”

The reason for the secrecy, Nadia said, was bound up with belief in magic. “Some people think that if they reveal their name, it can be used for black magic. But I trust you. And,” she chuckled, “you don’t have access to the black magic books.” Magic is the fourth and final link between the modern Mandaeans and the ancient Babylonians. The
Nabatean Agriculture
included a great number of magical spells in its list of agricultural techniques. (Some examples: averting hail by placing a tortoise on its back in the middle of a field, or having three menstruating women bare their vulvas at any approaching hailstorms to make them go the other way, using the apotropaic power of menstrual blood.)

In the seventh century, the Christian writer Yohannan bar Penkaye (who lived near where the Turkish-Iraqi border is today) said that sorcery was more common in his town than it had been in ancient Babylon. In the 1930s, E. S. Drower was fascinated by the survival of magic in Iraqi society. Magicians—of all different religions—told people’s future and also produced love charms. She wrote of a modern spell that could easily have come from
Nabatean Agriculture
: “To cure a Baghdad boil . . . take a sparrow, kill it, and apply his body so that the fresh warm blood touches the sore. Then hang the sparrow up. As the body dries so will the boil dry up and disappear.”

Jews and Mandaeans, Drower writes, were particularly famous for spells. Mostly they gave out amulets and good-luck charms, but occasionally they used darker arts. Drower’s collection at the Bodleian includes a book of “black magic”; Drower justified using the term because, she said, even in the Mandaean language this book was described as “evil,” as it contained spells for breaking up marriages, inflicting illness, and bestowing curses. I leafed through its pages and saw diagrams of the human body, numerological charts, strange symbols, and unreadable letters repeated over and over again, all blotched with ink (suggesting, perhaps, a lack of skill on the part of the scribe; or perhaps the pages had been wetted as part of a ceremony, for in some magical rites in the Middle East, water that has touched the ink of a sacred book is drunk as a ritual). It describes amulets made from bat’s wings inscribed with hoopoe blood and the blood of a rabid wolf; for a person who has been possessed by a demon on a Sunday (the Mandaean holy day), an ointment should be made from horse saliva, monkey and pigeon blood, the juice of mint and purslane, and olive and sesame oil, and then stuck into the victim’s nose.

Some of these spells had clearly been handed down over the generations since Babylonian times. Drower discovered for sale a Mandaean magic scroll that could be buried beside a grave in time of plague to avert the disease’s spread; it began with “In the name of Libat, mistress of gods and men,” an invocation to the Babylonian love goddess Libat (also known as Ishtar). Drower was told by Mandaeans in her day that Libat was consulted for oracles and invoked for love spells. She also found a recent Mandaean amulet designed for separating lovers, which declared: “Sundered is Bel from Babylon, sundered is Nebu from Borsippa.” Nebu was the god after whom the king Nebuchadnezzar was named, and Borsippa has been a ruin for more than two thousand years.

The commonest amulet among Mandaeans today is the
skanduleh,
which Nadia has hanging on her kitchen wall. It is placed under the pillow or mattress of small children, she told me, and is also placed in a basket of clothes belonging to a bride on her wedding day. (Remedies for the evil eye, in European tradition, are used in the same contexts; a traditional English poem tells a bride to wear “something borrowed” and “something blue” on her wedding day.) The
skanduleh
consists of a round disk with four animals pictured on it: a lion, a snake, a scorpion, and a wasp. These represent the forces of darkness and are used to frighten away evil spirits. In Uruk, in southern Iraq, German archaeologists discovered a scorpion amulet dating to the thirteenth century
BC
. The Ishtar gate of Babylon was decorated with mosaics of a snakelike creature with feline forelegs, possibly because it could evoke the sinister powers of both the lion and the snake.

Nadia’s aunt had made a living in Baghdad from spell casting, as Nadia told me. The walls of this aunt’s house were thin, and when the young Nadia was playing there with her cousins, they could all hear the consultations in the next room between the aunt and her various clients. People would come to her desperate for something that might improve their lives; often they wanted their daughters to marry rich men, and they hoped an amulet might help. Once the aunt enlisted Nadia’s help. She asked the girl to scribble on paper whatever came into her head, and then she took away the bits of paper and gave them to customers as magical amulets. Nadia’s aunt believed in the effect of these things, because so often the customers really did find life improved for them afterward.

Nadia’s aunt was a gentle, lovable character, which helps explain why people opened up to her. As a result, she had insight into every layer of Iraqi society—enough, even, to attract the attention of the secret police. “They tested me,” Nadia’s aunt said. “They sent undercover girls who sat down and checked exactly what I was doing. They told me I was in the clear because I did everything aboveboard.” Maybe they were trying to determine whether anything subversive was going on, for a soothsayer could be in a position to recruit conspirators. Or perhaps they were looking for evidence of the use of black magic (meaning curses; amulets and fortune-telling were considered harmless white magic), which might well have been punished.

Nadia’s aunt was still casting spells in the 1990s, when Nadia was studying languages at Baghdad University and working part-time at a printing shop so that she could pay her university fees. Those were tough times: after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, United Nations sanctions destroyed its economy. Per capita income declined by 85 percent. Chocolate had become so rare that a friend of Nadia’s celebrated her university graduation by giving a small piece of chocolate to each of her friends; Nadia took her piece home and split it with her sister. The teachers at the university had to work as taxi drivers half the day, and one of them even drove his own pupils to class—he needed the fare to supplement his meager salary. Children were sent out to find work instead of going to school. This, in a country that once had $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves, whose middle class in 1990 made up over half the population, and which had reduced illiteracy among those under age forty-five to less than 10 percent.

One day Nadia’s aunt came out of one of her spell-casting consultations with a troubled expression. Nadia and her cousins asked her what was wrong. “Oh, it was that client who just left,” she said. “She wanted an amulet for her daughter. She’s only fifteen, but the mother wants an amulet to help her daughter find a rich man to marry. The grandfather is ill, and the uncles are out of work. And as the woman took the amulet, she told me she had been dressing her daughter up with makeup and sending her out to knock on God’s door. So I was wondering what that might mean.” “Knocking on God’s door” was a phrase that a laborer might use to refer to standing in line with other workers waiting to be hired. “And I realized she must be sending her daughter out as a prostitute.”

It was not only the poor and desperate who wanted spells. So, as Nadia related, did Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s Ba’ath party had begun its rule with a brutal crackdown on political opponents, who included Iraq’s most distinguished Mandaean, Abdul-Jabbar Abdullah. Born in a village in southern Iraq in 1911, Abdullah had been able to travel to America and study at MIT; he also worked under Albert Einstein, who was impressed enough with his pupil’s talent that he presented him with his own Parker pen. Abdullah was a meteorologist (a branch of science particularly suited to the Mandaeans, who have inherited the Babylonians’ fascination with the stars). When the left-wing nationalist Abdul-Karim Qassem deposed the Iraqi monarchy and took power in 1958, Abdullah became the first president of Baghdad University. He was, however, a Communist—a common thing then among minorities in Iraq, who saw Communism’s secular ideology as a protection against religious bigotry. So when the anti-Communist Ba’ath party seized power in 1963 they sent men to arrest Abdullah; they burst into his office at the university, announced his dismissal, and arrested him. But only when they seized Einstein’s pen and snapped it in front of Abdullah did he burst into tears. Later freed, Abdullah fled to the United States, where he died.

Saddam was not an enemy to all Mandaeans, though: he employed one as a poet, and—seeing plots everywhere and fearing supernatural as well as human enemies—he also turned to the Mandaean high priest of the day for spells of protection. Perhaps because of this man’s spells—and the rumors of the Mandaeans’ powerful curses—Saddam looked after the Mandaeans. For a time he even extolled them as symbols of Iraqi identity. Like the palaces he built on the ruins of Babylon, the Mandaeans helped reinforce the idea that Iraq was a nation-state with a proud history rather than a province carved out of the Ottoman Empire. They did not represent a serious political threat, and they were not rich enough to be worth targeting for their money. Like Jews and Christians, they were identified as “people of the book”: the Mandaeans are identified as the “Sabians” mentioned in the Koran as deserving special leniency (as opposed to polytheist pagans, who were to be fought and killed). The Mandaeans even took care to publish one of their holy books in 2001 in a classical Arabic translation, a form designed to make it acceptable to Muslim readers. The Mandaeans knew they needed friends in high places. Their history was full of grim encounters with unjust rulers. And although in the twentieth century ideologies such as Communism and Arab nationalism held out the promise of equality, the fate of Iraq’s Jewish population showed that governments, more powerful now than ever, could penalize minorities as never before.